DIOGENES: In Search Of An Honest Politician!

DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this rainy day and read
posts from around the world.
The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it!
You may leave your opinion,
but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!

Thursday, May 14, 2015

1.6 million green cards issued to immigrants from Muslim countries; refugees in the mix!

This is a gem. Thanks to Conservative Review and investigator/writer Daniel Horowitz for pulling these numbers together in an easy to see graphic form. See the whole story here. Horowitz mentions refugees as part of the flow. (hat tip: Dick):
There is one caveat we need to mention and that is that not all of those entering the US from countries such as Iraq or Iran are Muslims, but we do get at least a ball park number from this data. Also, we do not take refugees from all of those countries listed above which reminds us that there are other LEGAL immigration programs admitting Muslim immigrants into the US. The next step is to identify all of those methods of entry.

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio program Wednesday, Charles Krauthammer, a licensed psychiatrist, couldn’t decide if President Obama is delusional or merely cynical. He also said the president is “sort of … pathological” in the way he picks up “these (anti-Fox) memes” while not knowing “a damn thing” about what’s on Fox News.
Dr. K. was reacting to the startling comments Obama made at George Washington University Tuesday:
“There’s always been a strain in American politics where you’ve got the middle class, and the question has been who are you mad at if you’re struggling, if you’re working, but you don’t seem to be getting ahead,” the president said.. “And over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to make be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, or don’t want to work, are lazy, you know, or undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu. They will find, like folks who make me mad, and I don’t know where they find them, right? They’re all like, like I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obama phone or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative, right, that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical who’s raising a couple of kids, and is doing everything right, but still can’t pay the bills. And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, (!) we’re going to have to change how our body politick thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, (!!) and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like, and how budgets connect to that. And that’s a hard process, because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have.”
We’ve all come to expect these little mask-slipping episodes from Obama these past six+ years, but comments about controlling the media are particularly unsettling. What on earth was he proposing?
Hewitt asked Krauthammer for his take on the remarks.
Krauthammer quipped, “I remember we talked about it last night on Special Report, and I suggested that Fox buy a full-page ad touting the fact that Barack Obama is apparently now a constant viewer of Fox News, he’s such an expert on it.”
“He said if you watch it all the time, so I’m glad to know that he’s joined this vast audience that Fox commands. Look, this is sort of a pathological Obama where you know, he picks up these memes. He doesn’t know a damn thing about what’s on Fox. The idea that Fox is constantly showing, you know, sponges and leeches, and never shows the waitress trying to make it, it’s just sort of the mythological world that he lives in. Or he may be cynical. I mean, he may know it’s all nonsense. I mean, I can’t tell. I mean, after all, you probably need a psychiatrist to figure that out. But it’s either cynical or just hopelessly deluded on this. I would prefer to think he’s cynical, because I’d like somebody in the White House who’s not delusional. And this is the usual Obama cynicism. It’s the media, it’s the press, they’re underreporting liberal successes. I mean, look, the fact is a war on poverty, the billions poured into helping the poor, which in my 20s I rather supported until in my 30s, the empirical social science evidence began to come out that not only was money poured down the drain, but it was undermining the traditional structures of even the poorest neighborhoods and leading to real terrible pathologies, including helping to accelerate the breakdown of the family. So these are, there’s just the empirical social science refuting the liberal nostrums about how to help the poor. But he never engages in an argument. It’s all ad hominin.”
Hewitt agreed whole-heartedly with Krauthammer’s take. “I spent 15 years on the Children and Families Commission out here in California,” he said. “And Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist, who is a man of the left, just wrote this book, Our Kids, which documents in great detail everything you just said. The Times of London calls him the most influential academic in the world. He’s a lefty, right, but he recognizes the devastation brought about by all the wrong policy choices of the 60s on the family in America. It’s got nothing to do with Fox News.”
Dr. K did make one firm diagnosis.
“He’s got a tick,” he said. “I said last night, he’s got a tick, and it’s curable. I was going to offer to cure it myself, but I’m otherwise occupied. And even though licensed, I don’t practice anymore.”
My own take is that Obama — our first Alinsky-trained president — loves to get in front of young audiences and spout anti-Fox News propaganda because he knows that Fox News is unpopular on college campuses. So he gets to throw out what should be a hugely controversial trial balloon in a completely safe environment.
Of course, one can only speculate about what sort of policy prescriptions he has in mind to make the media more to his liking, but a controversial FCC program that was considered about a year ago could provide us with a clue.
In February of 2014, Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai blew the whistle on an FCC scheme that would have put researchers in American newsrooms to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide on which stories to run.
In a Wall Street Journal piece titled ”The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom,” Pai wrote:.
The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”
How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of “critical information” such as the “environment” and “economic opportunities,” that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their “news philosophy” and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.
After a two-week long (conservative) media firestorm, the FCC retreated from their bizarre plan, but given Obama’s comments at Georgetown this week, one can’t help but wonder if he’s thinking about imposing some similar scheme in newsrooms across America in the time he has left.

Why Ted Cruz is wowing some of Wall Street's money-men

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, a Tea Party favorite and leading figure in the 2013 government shutdown that rattled investors, isn’t the kind of politician who usually wins a lot of friends among Wall Street campaign donors.
The freshman Republican senator from Texas has none of the moderate tendencies that financiers often prefer in presidential candidates. Cruz relishes his image as an anti-establishment figure and boasts of his aversion to compromise. He has vowed to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and repeal President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare plan, commonly known as Obamacare.
Despite the uncompromising rhetoric, Cruz is winning praise from some potential Wall Street donors, including bankers and hedge fund managers, who told Reuters there is more to him than the conservative firebrand of the campaign trail. He has been courting financiers in their homes in New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, they said....

Leaders of the Lynch Mob

Leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are obliquely endorsing killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism as the radical community organizers of the so-called Black Spring ramp up political violence and civil unrest.
For example, on-the-record statements by Twitter stars DeRay Mckesson, 29 and Johnetta Elzie, 26, are all over the Internet. Mckesson and Elzie are influential activists who have become legacy-media darlings by using social media to push their racial-grievance agenda.
A very long, fawning profile of the duo by writer Jay Caspian Kang, who in his day job is an editor at The New Yorker magazine, elucidates what they believe.
Both of these community organizers bounce between reverence for nonviolent action and a refusal to condemn violent activism, which this writer would argue is tantamount to endorsing violent activism.
Mckesson and Elzie believe that the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr. has been distorted.
“He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest,” Kang writes, “invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement.”
But they “frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one,” Kang writes.
“To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter ‘efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.'”
“If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it,” he writes.
The New York Times Magazine/I> notes, almost in passing, that respected activist Ashley Yates “created T-shirts and hoodies that read ‘ASSATA TAUGHT ME’ — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography.”
Understandably, the article doesn’t bother to explain the historical significance of Shakur, a black fugitive from American justice who was long ago granted asylum by Communist Cuba. Doing so would disrupt the narrative that dogmatically reinforces the idea that Black Lives Matter must be viewed by all as a noble, nonviolent movement and that any suggestion to the contrary is inherently malevolent and racist. The left effected the same kind of whitewash with the rapists and fire-bombers of the ridiculously violent Occupy Wall Street movement even in the face of overwhelming evidence of rampant criminality among its activists and supporters.
Shakur, who was previously known as JoAnne Chesimard, is a terrorist and convicted cop killer. No mere foot soldier, Shakur was “the soul of the Black Liberation Army,” according to former assistant FBI director John Miller. Although Cuba has indicated that the thaw-in-progress in relations with the U.S. will not lead to Shakur’s repatriation, she remains on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorists list. Information that leads directly to her capture is worth a $2 million reward. (This writer reported on Shakur recently at FrontPage.)
The Black Liberation Army that Shakur had been a part of was a spinoff group of the Black Panthers. This armed organization, according to New Jersey State Police, was “a radical left wing terror group that felt justified killing law enforcement officers … This group conducted assaults on police stations and murdered police officers.”
While she was wanted in 1973 for a crime spree that included bank robbery and murder, police pulled over Shakur and two accomplices on the New Jersey Turnpike for a busted tail-light. As the two others opened fire, Shakur hopped out of the vehicle. While white state trooper Werner Foerster fought with the driver, Chesimard seized Foerster’s service revolver and put two rounds in his head execution-style. Two years after being sentenced to a term of life imprisonment plus 33 years, she was sprung from prison by persons unknown. She fled to the welcoming arms of Fidel Castro.
Shakur has since become a role model for radicals everywhere. She may even be in the process of becoming a black female version of the world’s most popular tee shirt salesman, the late Argentinian-born Communist terrorist and mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Shakur also happens to be the aunt and godmother of Tupac Shakur, a legendary rapper who founded a musical group called Thug Life. The nephew-godson was murdered in 1996 in Las Vegas allegedly by a now-deceased member of the criminal gang known as the Crips.
If reporters nowadays applied the same journalism standards to the killing of Tupac Shakur that they use when reporting on left-wing protests, they might very well characterize the performer’s encounter with his killer as a “mostly peaceful” event. After all, the actual gunfire occupied only a tiny portion of all the time involved in nonviolently stalking the victim, blasting him into eternity, and then nonviolently fleeing from the scene — and for all we know the murder was intended as a statement of some kind that community organizers might in theory defend as political expression.
This sort of tongue-in-cheek formulation isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds.
In topsy-turvy Baltimore during the recent riots that followed the suspicious death in police custody of young black arrestee Freddie Gray, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, welcomed criminal gangs and radical groups into city government. The Democrat who proudly boasted that she protected the First Amendment right to protest by providing space to those who “wished to destroy” local businesses, has partnered with the Crips, Bloods, Black Guerrilla Army, and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam in what some might consider an unorthodox effort to maintain civil order in that city. It’s not working so well as the recent epidemic of murders in Baltimore attests.
Last fall Mckesson wrote approvingly of Assata Shakur in Ebony.
“By October, the protest community became both highly organized, as actual organizations began to form and solidify, and more thoughtful and conscious about the symbolism and intent of protest actions. Whether invoking Assata Shakur’s, “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” or Dr. King’s, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the protest community actively began to shift to speak to larger narratives of social justice, while situating Ferguson as the site of resistance.”
In a telling April 28 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Mckesson glibly dismissed the widespread looting and destruction of private businesses that authorities allowed to happen in Baltimore as trifling. Mckesson, who was identified on-screen as a “community organizer,” was active in protests last year in Ferguson, Mo. after black teenager Michael Brown was killed as he attacked a white police officer.
Blitzer repeatedly tried to get Mckesson to condemn mob violence and Mckesson pointedly refused to do so.
Asked what his plans in Charm City were, Mckesson said:
“There’s been a lot of positive demonstrations over the past couple months here in Baltimore and across the country because the police have continued to kill people. Tonight will be another night where people come out in the streets to confront a system that is corrupt.”
Blitzer replied, “But you want peaceful protests, right?”
Mckesson said:
“Yes, for sure. And remember the people that have been violent since August has been the police. We think about the 300 people that have been killed alone, that is violence. Property damage here that’s been really unfortunate over the past couple, for a day or so here. There have been many days of peaceful protests in Baltimore City and places all around the country.”
Blitzer said, “But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires, these are statistics, local police have put out 15 structure fires. There is no excuse for that kind of violence, right?”
Mckesson was nonresponsive. He replied, “Again, there’s no excuse for the seven people that the Baltimore Police Department has killed in the past year either, right?”
Blitzer insisted, “We’re not making comparisons, obviously,” adding, “We don’t want anybody hurt.” The anchor continued, “I just want to hear you say there should be peaceful protests — not violent protests — in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King.”
“There should be peaceful protests,” Mckesson said, paying lip service to nonviolence.
He continued:
“I don’t have to condone it to understand it, right, that the pain that people feel is real and you are making a comparison. You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines, right? And what we know to be true is that the police are killing people everywhere, killing people here, six police officers were involved in the killing of Freddie Gray and we’re looking for justice there. And that’s real, right. Like the violence that the police have been inflicting on communities of color has been sustained and deep.”
Blitzer then said, “But you agree, I assume, with President Obama, who said a few moments ago, there is no excuse for the violence that erupted yesterday, no excuse for the stealing, for the arson. You agree with the president?”
Mckesson then engaged in an elaborate circumlocution, saying on the one hand that he personally would advocate peaceful protest, and on the other that mob violence was acceptable.
What I agree with is that I advocate people to peacefully protest and know that pain manifests in different ways and I don’t have to condone it to understand it. People are grieving and people are mourning. And I would advocate personally for people to do it in ways that you are calling ‘peacefully.’ I know that Freddie Gray will never be back and those windows will be.
Blitzer pointed out that President Obama said the violence “distracted from the peaceful protests and distracted from the mourning that the family of Freddie Gray was seeking yesterday.”
Mckesson responded with word games.
Distracted from progress is when city officials get on TV and call black people in pain “thugs,” right? That’s a distraction. I think that the unrest, the uprising, whatever you call it, is again a cry for justice here and a cry for justice across the country because police continue to terrorize people. The terrorizing is actually deadly. Broken windows are not broken spines. People are in pain. So I think that the president, I hope that he understands the conditions that created the unrest and continue the unrest not only here in Baltimore but across the country. Freddie Gray will never see another day and neither will Tamir [Rice, who was shot to death by Cleveland Police,] or Mike Brown.
In a triple-bylined oped in the Nov. 19, 2014 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Elzie and Mckesson paid lip service to peaceful political expression just as Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky would do.
We are peaceful. We discipline ourselves and remain resolutely confident in the righteousness of our cause, even in the face of weapons of war. We ensure that actions remain peaceful, purposeful, and focused on our message, not on chaos. That we must continually remind and convince the public of our peaceful stance is disheartening. We are so often irresponsibly labeled as thugs by those who would – consciously or not – use our peaceful protests to revive the myth of the violent black savage.
In other words, criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement is racist.
Regular Americans not obsessed with race, class, and gender, are likely to disagree.

Stephen Hawking warns computers will overtake humans within 100 years

Stephen Hawking today warned that computers will overtake humans in terms of intelligence at some point within the next century.
Speaking at the Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London, the internationally renowned cosmologist and Cambridge University professor, said: “Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.”
Hawking, who signed an open letter alongside Elon Musk earlier this year warning AI development should not go on uncontrolled, added: “Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we use it.”
In the short term, people are concerned about who controls AI, but in the long term, the concern will be whether AI can be controlled at all, said Hawking.
AI can be defined as the intelligence exhibited by machines or software. It has the potential to have a profound impact on the world as people know and it’s an area being pursued by global tech giants such as Google and Facebook.
AI technology is already built into devices we use in our every day lives. For example, Siri, an intelligent personal assistant that sits inside iPhones and iPads is underpinned by AI developed by Apple, while Google's self-driving vehicles also rely heavily on AI. According to the FT, more than 150 startups in Silicon Valley are working on AI today.
Hawking believes that scientists and technologists need to safely and carefully coordinate and communicate advancements in AI to ensure it does not grow beyond humanity's control.

Barack Obama, pathetic at three levels!

Yesterday, as John noted, President Obama took a swing at Fox News during a conference on poverty. Obama said:

Sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top or to make folks mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, who don’t want to work, lazy, undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated.I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu, they will [present] folks who make me mad. I don’t even know where they find them. They are all like I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obamaphone or whatever. That becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up.

Where did Obama come up with this? Does he watch Fox News “on a regular basis”? Surely not.

This is vintage Obama.

First, he’s dishonest. His assertion about Fox News is an invention.

Second, he’s unpresidential. It’s beneath the dignity of his office for Obama to whine about a cable news network. This isn’t the first time Obama has gone after Fox News. Each time he does, he makes himself more pathetic.

Third, Obama is unserious. Poverty is an important issue. It deserves serious discussion.